We Keep Moving

by Elijah J. Mears

It’s hard to breathe the smoky air, stepping over shattered concrete and broken glass, but we keep moving, shuffling along the cracked pavement like zombies.

My sister is hungry. We’re both hungry, but I’ve learned how to ignore my stomach. Leah is only seven, a child of the ending days. She’s never known another life than this one. She’s only seven. Seven and hungry.

She sits on my shoulders—seven and hungry is too young to walk on the decaying road—and I point out the wrecked skyscrapers ahead. This is the city, I tell her. That was its beating heart and soul, back before you were born, back before Mom and Dad died.

Before the fires. Before the bombs.

Before.

Do you remember Mom and Dad, kid?

I tighten my white-knuckled grip around Leah’s cold ankles, bloated and purple. I wrinkle my nose, trying to ignore the smell of her. She doesn’t reply. That’s okay. She’s hungry.

We keep moving.

Elijah J. Mears is an author of science-fiction and fantasy from North Carolina. Growing up Jewish, neurodivergent, and gay in the South, great speculative fiction was Elijah’s way of escaping from a world where he didn’t always fit in. When not writing, he can often be found baking cookies, building walkable, urbanist neighborhoods for his Sims, or daydreaming about seeing the country from an Amtrak lounge car.